by Josi Russell
And it was not just their faces he saw. It was, too, the faces of his own patients, the Alpha group of Caretakers, whose training he had overseen, back at the Callisto Base on Earth. His imprisonment in this chamber was, he knew, fitting recompense for the isolation training he had designed to ready them for their work of watching over the passengers on the stasis ships.
At first, his design for the training had been theoretical, an enjoyable brain-game that he’d published in a journal as pure speculation. How would such conditions effect a human being? And when the UEG had come to him and asked him if he would create it in detail at their training facility, his ego had overruled his ethics.
He had long argued that it was effective. That regardless of how the method looked from the outside, it created Caretakers with the mental fortitude to endure half a century alone in space.
But Steph had seen it: the cruelty of it. She had met the recruits who hadn’t made it through the training, the ones who had broken down and carried with them the paranoias and rages that the training had given them. Steph had seen it, and when she had seen what he had done, she couldn’t stay with him. Her leaving made him see it, too.
At what cost, then, came all of humanity’s achievements? For every gain a loss, for every victory a price. And who was qualified to weigh those, to decide which direction the scale should tip?
***
When the heavy boots sounded through the passenger hold, Taiver was standing with his hand through the bent grate at the top of the chamber, feeling around to find any hope of releasing the seal.
Surprise crossed the features of the UEG engineering team that discovered Taiver. He knew that they had been sent, but hadn’t known what they were meant to do.
“You’re awake?” a broad-faced kid asked, his tawny hair falling into his eyes. “How?”
“It’s a long story,” Taiver said. “Can you guys get me out of here?”
“Good thing we showed up,” the kid said, opening a kit filled with tools. “I’m Reese.” He called up the screen and read for a moment. He ran a hand around the seal, then stopped and leaned close to the chamber’s handle.
“Here’s your problem,” he said, reaching down. There was a scraping sound, and Taiver staggered backwards as the door suddenly swung open. In front of him, framed by the dark seal of the gaping door, the young engineer stood holding up Hannah’s little pry bar.
“Where’s the soldier that was here? Hannah?”
Reese looked puzzled. “She’s gone. Went to UEG headquarters on Minea a couple hours ago. But don’t worry, we’re staying with you, and once we have the chip drive online, we’ll be at Minea before you know it.”
So she had taken her research and fled, then. Taiver stumbled out of the chamber, reveling in the broad expanse of space around him. The young engineer braced him up with a hand under his elbow. Taiver looked directly, for the first time in days, at the writhing forms of the other passengers.
“Do you know how to fix their fluid mixture?” he asked urgently. “It’s been tampered with.”
“Well, sure.” The kid nodded.
“We need to do it. Now.”
“Sir, we can’t—”
“Check it,” he barked, his breath coming fast and hard. “It’s been tampered with.”
Reese turned back to the screen and glanced sideways at Taiver. “You’re right.” The kid tapped his comm link. “Sir, I’m in the passenger hold, and the fluid’s all messed up. We need to get it back to spec.”
There ensued a cross check, followed by the order to reset the system.
As ribbons of new fluid began to circulate around the sleepers in their chambers, Taiver felt his heart begin to slow. The passengers down the row calmed and hung motionless, sleeping peacefully, as he was used to seeing them. They would awaken. Minea was close. And someday, somewhere, Hannah would learn, as he had, the great price of her new knowledge.
Taiver didn’t know why he glanced over. He didn’t know why, in the heady excitement of his freedom and in the moment that things were being put right, he let his gaze settle on the girl across the aisle. But there, through the crystalline stasis fluid, he saw her deep brown eyes, open wide and terrified.
This story comes from the world of the bestselling Caretaker Chronicles. If you liked it, get the book that started it all here.
Fifty years in space—alone.
Ethan Bryant was supposed to fall asleep on a ship leaving Earth and wake up fifty years later with his family on the planet Minea. Instead, after the ship’s caretaker—the lone human in charge of monitoring the ship’s vital systems—suddenly died, the ship’s computer locked Ethan out of his stasis chamber and gave him the job. That was five years ago. Five years of checking to make sure everything runs smoothly on a ship Ethan knows almost nothing about.
Who wouldn’t dread the years ahead? Who wouldn’t long for their once-bright future now stolen away?
Ethan is resigned to his fate, until the ship suddenly wakes up another passenger: a beautiful engineer who, along with Ethan, soon discovers a horrible secret—a navigation room hidden from even the ship’s computer. The ship is not bound for Minea—but to somewhere far more dangerous.
With the ship nearing its sinister destination, Ethan soon learns he is the only one who holds the key to saving all 4,000 passengers from a highly-advanced, hostile alien race.
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About the Author
Josi Russell’s science fiction novels explore familiar human relationships in unfamiliar contexts. She is captivated by the fields of linguistics, mathematics, and medicine, by the vast unknown beyond our atmosphere, and by the whole adventure of being human.